Welcome!
I am a PhD Candidate in Finance at Yale University. My research focuses on household finance, climate finance, and development economics.
I will be on the 2026-2027 Job Market. Please do not hesitate to contact me.
I will be on the 2026-2027 Job Market. Please do not hesitate to contact me.
Job Market Paper
I study how political orientation affects households’ decisions to invest in climate adaptation, focusing on hurricane-related wind risk in Florida. Using a novel dataset of 13 million building permits, I apply textual analysis to identify more than half a million wind-adaptation permits (like impact-resistant windows, storm shutters, structural reinforcements) and link them to voter registration records. I show that unconditionally, registered Republicans invest in wind-adaptation measures at a higher rate than registered Democrats; however, once I control for geographic fixed effects and a rich set of demographic and property characteristics (that help isolate the effects of political views from correlated confounders), the probability that Republicans invest in wind-adaptation measures is 4.5–6.5% lower than that of Democrats. These results hold also when controlling for property fixed effects – comparing households that purchase the same property at different points in time. These effects are economically meaningful, equivalent to two to three income deciles, and robust across specifications. Four pieces of evidence suggest that the different behavior of Democrats and Republicans reflects different beliefs about climate risks tied to political identity: the partisan gap in adaptation doubles among FEC campaign donors, consistent with stronger partisan identity amplifying the effect; the gap is larger in areas where building codes are less stringent, so household decisions are less constrained; the gap widens sharply at the start of the first Trump administration before narrowing after the relaunch of Florida’s My Safe Florida Home subsidy program (which was meant to reframe the issue in a less politicized way); and first-hand experience of hurricanes passing nearby induce both Democrats and Republicans to adapt more, but Republicans adjust less strongly, suggesting that political views act as an anchor to updating. I calculate the welfare losses due to partisan views to be around $200 million in aggregate, equivalent to the entire budget of the first My Safe Florida Home program.
Research
Best PhD Poster Award, Baruch-JFQA Climate Finance and Sustainability Conference
I study how political orientation affects households’ decisions to invest in climate adaptation, focusing on hurricane-related wind risk in Florida. Using a novel dataset of 13 million building permits, I apply textual analysis to identify more than half a million wind-adaptation permits (like impact-resistant windows, storm shutters, structural reinforcements) and link them to voter registration records. I show that unconditionally, registered Republicans invest in wind-adaptation measures at a higher rate than registered Democrats; however, once I control for geographic fixed effects and a rich set of demographic and property characteristics (that help isolate the effects of political views from correlated confounders), the probability that Republicans invest in wind-adaptation measures is 4.5–6.5% lower than that of Democrats. These results hold also when controlling for property fixed effects – comparing households that purchase the same property at different points in time. These effects are economically meaningful, equivalent to two to three income deciles, and robust across specifications. Four pieces of evidence suggest that the different behavior of Democrats and Republicans reflects different beliefs about climate risks tied to political identity: the partisan gap in adaptation doubles among FEC campaign donors, consistent with stronger partisan identity amplifying the effect; the gap is larger in areas where building codes are less stringent, so household decisions are less constrained; the gap widens sharply at the start of the first Trump administration before narrowing after the relaunch of Florida’s My Safe Florida Home subsidy program (which was meant to reframe the issue in a less politicized way); and first-hand experience of hurricanes passing nearby induce both Democrats and Republicans to adapt more, but Republicans adjust less strongly, suggesting that political views act as an anchor to updating. I calculate the welfare losses due to partisan views to be around $200 million in aggregate, equivalent to the entire budget of the first My Safe Florida Home program.
A long literature has documented that on ex-dividend days stock prices fall by less than the dividend, even though this represents an anticipated and publicly known change in the value of the stock; on average, across 432,582 U.S. events since 1963, the price drop is only three quarters per dollar of dividend. The standard explanations are taxes and market microstructure. I show that the same underreaction arises in a laboratory market where neither applies. In the Yale Stock Trading Game, a rich market simulation environment, a public announcement reveals that the fundamental value of a stock has changed by an exact dollar amount; across 232 announcements in 58 trading sessions, prices move by only 0.177 per announced dollar at the first trade and 0.278 after ten trades, even though participants clearly notice the announcement and trading activity increases when it occurs. I show that this underreaction pattern can be explained within the framework of cognitive uncertainty of Enke and Graeber (2023): investors who are uncertain about the fundamental value of a stock stay close to its pre-event price (the cognitive default) and adjust only part of the way toward the new value. This behavioral explanation is consistent with the fact that we see the underreaction in the lab setting, where standard explanations are ruled out. It also makes an additional testable prediction: that we should see more underreaction where fundamental value is more uncertain. I verify this prediction empirically both in the game and in the market response on ex-dividend days.
This paper studies whether, and by how much, firms benefit from large-scale public health interventions. We study donor-financed malaria interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, exploiting year-to-year variation in global funding interacted with regions’ pre-program malaria burden. We find that these interventions substantially reduced the disease burden: a ten-percentage point increase in insecticide-treated-net coverage lowers the Plasmodium falciparum parasite rate (PfPR) by approximately nine percentage points. We also find that firms benefit from these interventions. A ten percentage point reduction in malaria prevalence increases maize and commercial scale mining production by approximately thirty percent. Our findings push toward a public–private financing architecture rather than a purely public (or donor) one: we propose a mechanism in which firms contribute in proportion to the benefits they extract from these interventions, freeing scarce donor resources for the diffuse-benefit settings, such as smallholder agriculture and child health, where no single actor captures enough return to finance provision privately.
This paper presents a methodology combining household survey data with tax records to construct comprehensive income distributions. Applied to Colombia, the approach addresses the well-known limitations of each data source: surveys underrepresent top incomes while tax records miss the bottom of the distribution. The combined methodology yields a complete picture of income inequality from top to bottom.
Curriculum Vitae
You can download my most recent CV below.
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Mailing Address
Yale School of Management
165 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT 06520